


many is a word that only leaves you guessing

by halfmoonsevenstars



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Background Howard Stark/Maria Stark - Freeform, Gen, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Gabe Jones - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-22 03:25:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2492702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfmoonsevenstars/pseuds/halfmoonsevenstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How’s my best girl today?” Steve greets her, just like he always does, his young face shining bright with optimism and good cheer.</p><p>Peggy doesn’t bother to match his mood, not today. “There’s something I need to tell you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	many is a word that only leaves you guessing

**Author's Note:**

> In the main Marvel comics continuity, the Winter Soldier broke free of his programming for three weeks in February 1973 and made it all the way to New York before he was recaptured by the KGB and sent back to Moscow. He was never allowed an assignment in the United States again.
> 
> In the MCU, there is no mention of this having happened—but it doesn't mean that it couldn't have, or that when it did happen, the Winter Soldier didn't try to contact the one person whose name he could remember, if not his own: Peggy Carter.

Peggy isn’t completely unaware that her mind is not quite what it used to be.

In fact, she _knows_ that it’s nowhere near what it used to be—more often than not, she’ll catch herself talking to the nurse and calling him Gabe, or she’ll refer to the wrong president in passing conversation, or she’ll wake up from a fitful nap panicked that she’d forgotten to sign off on that report Alexander had asked for.

These are not the kinds of mistakes she used to make. She couldn’t afford to, before now.

The first time Steve comes to see her, Peggy thinks that she’s imagining things again; lately it’s been getting harder and harder for her to distinguish memory from present-day reality, and when he walks in looking not a day over 26, she relaxes into her nest of pillows, because it can’t _possibly_ be real. Of course, he’s wearing clothes that are in the current style, and that’s what tips her off. The Steve Rogers she knew would never have allowed anyone to see him in a pair of denim jeans. Certainly not a lady, anyway.

Peggy stays quiet for now, though, waiting to see what his response is. Surely he hadn’t been able to prepare himself for this—she’s gotten her seventy-odd years, in full, to process the passage of time. But Steve hasn’t. And she doesn’t—she _can’t_ —reasonably expect him to react well.

But he does.

He smiles, in fact, the corners of his blue eyes crinkling in that old familiar way, and he takes the hard plastic chair next to her bed immediately so that he’s no longer towering over her. That’s just like Steve, to put them on equal footing to prevent anyone from feeling uncomfortable.

“You’re supposed to ask before you sit in the presence of a lady, Steve,” Peggy tells him, barely suppressing the urge to give in to a smile of her own.

“And here I thought the rules changed while I was asleep,” he replies easily.

Peggy twitches her duvet at him. “Not with me, they haven’t. Are you going to ask permission, or aren’t you?”

Steve laughs, reaching out and catching her hand in his own—and how some things never change; her hand is as small in his huge one as ever—to kiss it.

And that’s it.

They fall back into their old patterns, although now the topics of conversation are different. When Peggy can think straight, when she’s able to see what’s in front of her, she comes to look forward to his visits, even though she finds that this Steve is quieter and sadder than before. Something about that nags at her—not just the sorrow of someone she cares for a great deal, but there’s something else. Something _important_ , but she’ll be goddamned if she can remember it now.

He’s there when she wakes up from a nap one morning, and Peggy is momentarily startled by that—not because she hasn’t been accustomed to seeing Steve lately, but because she’d been having a dream that was so specific it could only be a real memory. There’s no reason that it wouldn’t be, because why would she make something like this up?

“How’s my best girl today?” Steve greets her, just like he always does, his young face shining bright with optimism and good cheer.

Peggy doesn’t bother to match his mood, not today. “There’s something I need to tell you."

“Oh.” Steve is clearly bewildered by her lack of effusiveness—as if he doesn’t know that she’s English—but he takes his usual seat next to her bedside, tentatively letting his hand rest next to hers on the duvet rather than lacing their fingers together as he always does.

She catches herself wishing that he hadn’t been there when she woke. It’s really very unkind of Peggy, she knows, but it would have given her more time to examine the dream, which is fortunately still vivid—for now. She can still taste the sourness of doubt at the back of her throat, but this is just too important to ignore.

“I—I’m not exactly one hundred percent certain,” Peggy says, drawing in a deep breath in the futile effort to slow down her racing heart. Damn good thing she isn’t hooked up to a monitor, or the nurses would be in here making a fuss and telling her to calm down when she’s _perfectly_ calm, just—

“That’s okay,” Steve says, and she’s sure he thinks he’s being reassuring.

Peggy shakes her head. “Not if it’s true. Give me a moment, Steve.”

He does, because she is old and frail and doesn’t always know when or where she is, and he is young and strong and can afford to indulge her whims.

\----

It was late—full dark, in fact—and Peggy was tired, but there was still a stack of paperwork on her desk that needed to be read in full and then signed off on. Best to just get it over with and done; after all, it would only be staring at her reproachfully from her desk when she walked in the next morning, if she didn’t finish it up. And if there was one thing Peggy hated, it was leftover work.

Peggy picked up the next neatly paper-clipped stack and settled back in her chair to begin reading, but soon found herself pinching the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger in a vain attempt to stave off the headache that was rapidly approaching. It irritated her to concede the point that she might need glasses, just as Gabriel had told her this morning at breakfast when she was squinting at the stocks and bonds page. Well, damned if she was going to find an optometrist at this hour; it would simply have to wait.

Her peace was shattered by the phone ringing—not the red one for emergencies, but her regular private line, which usually her secretary Miss Wei screened for her. But she was long gone for the day, of course. Peggy nearly shouted for her deputy to take care of it before she remembered that she’d sent Nicholas home, and he’d only put up a small fight about leaving. It had been noble of him, and she’d been tempted to ask him to stay, because he’d gotten very good at forging her signature, but there was no reason for that—not when his mother was so ill. Mrs. Fury needed all the help she could get, poor soul.

“Director Carter,” she said into the mouthpiece, cradling the receiver between her ear and shoulder.

But there was only silence on the other end of the line.

“Director Carter speaking,” Peggy repeated, in the event that this was Alexander calling her from a bad connection. The likelihood of that was high—he was always _somewhere_ that involved absolutely shit telecommunications systems.

“It’s—it’s really you.”

She couldn’t place the voice, although something about it seemed vaguely familiar beyond the way it sounded as if he hadn’t used it in a while.

“Of course it’s me; this is my private line. Who else were you expecting?”

“I—“ But he faltered, going silent for longer than Peggy had patience.

“Get on with it,” she snapped.

“I didn’t know who else to call. I need help,” the man said.

“Yes, you and everyone else these days, it seems.”

“Please,” he said, so softly that she almost missed it.

“Who _is_ this?” Peggy finally asked, just like she should have from the beginning, a testament to how damned tired she was that she hadn’t managed it before now.

There was a small, sad sigh from the other end of the line, and it was so pathetic that Peggy nearly felt sorry for him. “I don’t know,” he answered finally, as if it were something he’d had to think about very hard.

“Then I’m afraid I don’t know what to tell you,” Peggy said, and hung up.

The phone did not ring again that evening.

Peggy thought no more of it until early in the following week; she’d just returned to her office after a morning meeting with all her deputies and advisors, plus liaisons from no fewer than six government agencies and institutions. This Watergate affair was getting to be a right pain in Peggy’s backside; she had better things to do than to help Congress with their furor over the President doing what presidents always did.

Ah, well. At least the coffee had been decent.

She had just fed a few stacked leaves of carbon paper into the typewriter—Peggy preferred to draft her own reports to avoid any issues with transcription, and she was still a fast typist—when her private line rang.

“Director Carter.”

“Peggy?” It was the same voice as before—a little less rusty, but unmistakably from the same man. It also sounded very uncertain

“Not to you, I’m not,” she replied, tartly. “What do you want?”

“I need help. I’m in trouble.”

“And _I’m_ not inclined to repeat ancient history. I don’t know who you are or which idiotic agent of mine put you up to this, but as far as prank calls from cadets go, this is one of the least entertaining of them,” Peggy told him.

“No—it’s not—“

“You do realize that I could easily trace this call, don’t you?”

“Maybe you should,” he said, the slight quaver in his voice now gone. “Trace it. You’ll see that I’m not lying or wasting your time. I’ve got _people_ after me, and I’m good, but I can’t keep hiding forever.”

Peggy barely suppressed a snort at that. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

“Wh—“

“Do you _really_ think I’d waste my resources on this?” she asked.

“You ought to,” he said.

“Too bad.” Peggy didn’t give him the satisfaction of slamming the phone down in his ear; she merely tapped down on the switchhook before gently placing the handset back onto its cradle.

She heard no more from him for a week, which was just as well—the Senate hearings about the Watergate break-in were about to begin, the NYPD was beginning to panic about security plans for the opening of the new World Trade Center, and that irritating little toad Zola had come to her with a terminal cancer diagnosis. Not that Peggy gave a shit; as far as she was concerned, he ought to have been tried at Nuremberg with the rest of them, and if he died in the gutter it would be too good for him. But he was valuable to SHIELD and had provided them with both solid intelligence and useful innovations over the years, and Alexander insisted that he be given the best of hospice care when the time came. What a nuisance that man was becoming. He’d apparently known about it since the end of the previous year and never seen fit to give her a heads up.

Peggy would have to find something for him to do—maybe she’d send him over to the State Department; they’d been annoying her about wanting a new SHIELD liaison for years. He was ranked high enough that they wouldn’t find it insulting, and it would keep him busy. Besides, he _loved_ bureaucracy. It was almost weird how much he seemed to enjoy navigating through red tape and doublespeak, but at least he made himself useful. She couldn’t say the same about her other deputies, with the exception of Nicholas. Peggy would have to introduce them sometime.

She was reviewing the minutes from that morning’s debriefing about the Khartoum situation—maybe she’d send him there to deal with that first, as clearly the president had no interest in saving his own ambassador to Sudan—when her phone rang.

“Director Carter speaking.”

“You wore a red dress to the bar, the night before we ran that mission to get Zola. It had a satin collar and cuffs,” said the man on the other end of the line, hurriedly, as if he was afraid he would be hung up on before finishing his sentence.

Peggy frowned. He wasn’t _wrong_ about that, but—“Are you going somewhere with this?”

“I’m—look, don’t hang up, Peggy,” the man said. “Please. I’m not trying to pull a fast one on you. I just wanted you to know that I _know_ you.”

“A lot of people know me,” she replied. “You’ll have to try harder than that, I’m afraid.”

She heard a barely smothered grunt of irritation. “Well, I’m down to my last dime, so I’ve got to make this fast. Would I be going to all this trouble to contact you just to play games with your head?”

“There are some who’ve exerted far more effort merely to play games with my head. What is it that you _want_?”

“I wish I could tell you everything, but I don’t know it all myself. I’m not sure who’s behind it, but Peggy, like I said, there are people after me and I think they might be SSR. I dunno. I’m not sure. I made it to New York okay, but they can’t be far behind.”

“Who _are_ you?” Peggy asked, feeling a lot like a broken record, but she didn’t think he ever heard her because the operator broke in to request more change for the long-distance call to continue.

“I’m staying at this flophouse on the Lower East Side, just—send someone, would you? I don’t know if I can make it to Washington without getting picked u—“

There was a click, and then the line went dead.

Peggy tried not to think about it afterward, but she was unsettled nonetheless. The voice _had_ been vaguely familiar. But then, she’d met so many thousands of people over the past thirty years that a lot of voices seemed familiar to her. Yet there’d been something odd about his phrasing. It was almost—old-fashioned, in a way, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on how or why.

An hour later, still uneasy, she dialed Nicholas’s extension. “I need you to check something out for me in New York. I think we’ve got an agent in trouble,” Peggy told him without preamble. Of course, she had no idea whether this man really _was_ an agent, but what Nicholas didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“I’ll call you when I have something,” was his only reply before hanging up.

She didn’t start to worry until three days had passed without hearing from Nicholas. There were no more phone calls from the nameless man, either.

At least her secretary finally managed to track down Howard, which wasn’t easy given that he was always flying here and there these days, setting up deals and putting in time at various SI worksites. His relationship with SHIELD had waned over the past ten years, what with his increasing focus on the family business, but he never turned down a chance to talk to Peggy.

“Hey, Peg,” he greeted her. “What’s good? How’s the family?”

“Oh, they’re all right. Amanda is about to have her third baby already, and Jim’s just finishing up at West Point.”

“How about Gabe?”

“Gabriel’s enjoying retirement a great deal, although I fear I’ll walk into a blown-up living room some evening, with my furniture all in splinters,” she replied with a laugh. “He can’t seem to stop experimenting.”

“I’m sure that’s all my fault.”

“Well, you _are_ easy to blame for everything, Howard.” Peggy leaned back in her office chair a bit, wiggling her toes inside her pumps to keep the blood circulating. “How are Maria and—“ Blast, she couldn’t remember the boy’s name for the life of her.

“Tony? Just fine. Gets into _everything_ , though. God, I’m getting too old to chase him around. It’s _killing_ my back. Maria’s fine too. Has her finger in just about every charity pie you can name.”

“Good, good,” she murmured. “Listen, this might sound odd, but I was wondering if you’ve gotten any—prank calls lately?”

Howard barked a laugh at that. “Peggy, I’m owner and CEO of Stark Industries. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t get a prank call or a love letter or a death threat. Sometimes all three at once, if they’re a _real_ nut. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve been getting some strange calls lately,” she told him, “and I think someone’s trying to get to me. It was some…sensitive information.” Best not to let on too much, as for all Howard’s founder status, he was barely even a consultant anymore.

He paused for a moment, but even in introspection he wasn’t totally silent; she could hear him fishing for, procuring, and lighting a cigarette. “I’m sorry, Peg, but I can’t think of anything specific. I’ll let you know if anything unusual turns up, though, okay?”

“Thank you. Give my love to Maria, will you?”

“Of course. Tell Gabe I said hi, and that if he ever gets bored, he’s got a job waiting for him here.”

“I’ll let him know.”

“Hey, and take care of yourself, okay?”

“I will if you will.”

She’d barely placed the receiver back in the cradle when her intercom buzzed. “Agent Fury on line two for you, Director.”

“Put him through, Miss Wei.” And then a brief pause before she intercepted the phone mid-ring. “What’ve you got for me, Nicholas?” Peggy said.

“Absolutely jack shit, ma’am.”

“You’re kidding me. Three days in New York and you have _nothing_?”

“I don’t joke about these kinds of things, Director. The closest I got was that a STRIKE team was passing through New York a couple of days ago, but their story checked out fine. They were there under Fontaine’s orders dealing with World Trade security.”

“And you’ve spoken with our people.”

“All our people and then some,” Nicholas confirmed. “With a little more time, I can go deeper, if that’s what you want.”

Peggy couldn’t help but sigh, an indulgence she rarely allowed herself, but she felt no compunction about doing so now. “Take another three days, but if you don’t turn up anything useful, just come home. I might need you soon anyway.”

“Khartoum?”

“Precisely.”

She wasn’t entirely surprised when Nicholas arrived at her office at 8:00 AM sharp three days later, with nothing to show for his efforts except a sack of bagels from Russ and Daughters. There were only two explanations for what this had all been about, and Peggy wasn’t sure she liked either of them. In one scenario, she was purposely being distracted from something else. In the other, she was being played for a fool and had been unable to see it until now.

She wasn’t sure which prospect she liked less.

But troublesome thoughts have a way of eventually fading along the backdrop of more pressing issues, and of those, Peggy had more than enough to keep her busy. There were always fires to put out, so to speak. The urgency in the man’s voice lessened each time she could spare a moment to think about it, and eventually she could no longer remember what he sounded like at all—and there were no more phone calls of that nature to remind her of his voice.

Stress and the distractions of a heavy workload could do funny things to a person, Peggy told herself, and after a while she started to believe it.

\----

“I don’t think Sgt. Barnes is dead, Steve,” she says, and it comes out not as the forceful, definitive statement that Peggy had intended, but more like a wheeze.

Steve, ever helpful, holds a glass of water for her to sip. She does, mostly because it’s easier to do that than it is to argue with him about it.

“What makes you think that?” Steve isn’t patronizing—Peggy doesn’t think he would even know _how_ to be—but he obviously doesn’t believe she’s in her right mind.

Unfortunately for the both of them, she is. She wishes that she wasn’t.

“I think I made an awful mistake,” Peggy tells him, a lump rising in her throat and threatening to choke her the way she deserves. “I was too late, Steve. I—I thought someone was playing a vicious joke on me. That they were trying to—get in my head. Throw me off. Distract me. But I don’t think that was it at all.”

Steve frowns. “What are you saying, Peg?”

“I think he’s alive,” she says, swallowing a sob. “And I didn’t do anything about it.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. You’d have done anything you could,” he tells her.

Peggy closes her eyes briefly. “No, Steve. I didn’t. Please—you should look into this. You should know for certain. I think something awful happened to him and I was too late to stop it and then I started—started questioning myself, and I decided it was just stress, but it _wasn’t_ , Steve, and you have to promise me you’ll—“

“I will,” Steve says immediately, before she can even finish her sentence.

“Look into this. _Please_ ,” Peggy says, and she can’t remember the last time she meant the word so deeply. “Don’t make my mistakes.”

“I’ll do it, Peggy,” he tells her, finally catching her hand in his and giving it a squeeze.

She would love to believe him, because Steve is always so earnest and so kind and so respectful, but—he smiles at her and it’s the way her grandchildren smile when they tell her they’ll visit again next week, Gran, really—she knows he won’t follow through.

Months and months later, although Peggy doesn’t know it is, a gorgeous golden-haired boy with deep shadows under his bright blue eyes comes to tell her that she was right; Bucky is alive, and he’s sorry that he didn’t listen to her before, and he’s going after him.

Peggy frowns. “I’m sorry, young man, but I’ve absolutely no idea what you mean.”

His face crumples, but he leaves before she’s forced to hit the call button and summon an orderly to get him out of her doorway.

What a nuisance, she says to herself. Probably has the wrong room. Isn’t that just like a young person—can’t tell one old lady from another.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a line in Led Zeppelin's "Over the Hills and Far Away," because I like to keep a running theme when it comes to my fic titles, apparently. Don't be surprised if the next one involves a bustle in the hedgerow.


End file.
